Platinum and other precious metal-based catalysts have proven to provide superior performance to proton exchange membrane fuel cell technology. One of the major hurdles for mass-commercialization of proton exchange membrane fuel cell vehicles is their high cost. This is due, in particular, to the usage of platinum and other precious group metals as the electrocatalyst. Two potential strategies to reduce the cost are to either significantly lower the loading of platinum/precious group metals (PGM) or by using non-precious group metal (non-PGM) catalysts such as metal-nitrogen-carbon (MNC) type catalysts. So far, however, performance of non-PGM based electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells has been no match against the performance of PGM based catalysts, in part because they have a relatively low number of active sites per unit volume.